Top Global Rugby Team Wins with Cloud Apps
That Motivate Fans, Monitor Player Health
Overview
Customer: The British & Irish Lions
Customer Website: www.lionsrugby.com
Country or Region: UK and Ireland
Industry: Media and entertainment—
Sports, leagues, and teams
Customer Profile
The British & Irish Lions is a combined
rugby team made up of the best players
from England, Ireland, Scotland, and
Wales.
Business Situation
For one of the world’s leading rugby
events, The Lions wanted to involve the
millions of their fans who could not
journey with them on a tour halfway
around the world.
Solution
The team created a mobile app hosted
on Windows Azure that featured
compelling content, interactive
competitions, near-real-time videos, and
other innovative features.
Benefits
 Non-professionals easily upload nearreal-time video
 Supports 12,000 page requests per
second with 10 instances
 Reduces development time and cost,
and hosting expense by 80 percent
“We couldn’t have done shared video over an app with
fans halfway around the world if Microsoft hadn’t made
it so easy for us.”
Shane Whelan, Digital Communications Manager for the British & Irish Lions
The British & Irish Lions, the world-renowned touring rugby
team, wanted to do something it had never done in 125 years of
international competition: find a way to take along 100 million
fans when the team toured to Hong Kong and Australia. It
succeeded, virtually, with an app for Windows, Apple, and
Android devices hosted on Windows Azure. Nokia phones and
Microsoft Surface tablets made it easy for the team to upload
behind-the-scenes video for immediate viewing around the
world, while interactive competitions helped generate fan
enthusiasm. Meanwhile, a second Windows Azure app
monitored player health and helped to optimize playing rosters
and training schedules. For the first time in 16 years, The Lions
won the Tour. Coincidence? You decide.
“Microsoft technology is
already embedded in our
processes. Windows
Azure is an extension of
that; it’s just easier, more
natural for us to use.”
Jon Stoneman, Chief Technology Officer,
Sequence
Situation
It’s relatively easy to get the best rugby
players in England, Ireland, Scotland, and
Wales to the other side of the planet; just
put them on a jet. But how do you take
along 100 million of their closest fans?
That’s a question that plagued The British
& Irish Lions as they planned their
quadrennial Tour to challenge the best
rugby teams in the Southern Hemisphere,
2013 would see them visit both Hong Kong
and Australia. The Lions—named Team of
the Year at the 2013 BBC Sports Personality
Awards—are a unique occurrence in
modern sport. The best of the best coming
together only once every four years. To be
picked for the Lions Tour is the highest
accolade a player can receive.
The 2013 Tour—marking the 125th
anniversary of the event—was fraught with
suspense: The Lions had not won a Tour in
16 years. Would this be the year to end that
streak? Fans would be particularly keen to
know. And their engagement with the
event would no doubt be a huge moralebooster for the team, helping to spur them
to victory. But most fans, of course, could
not be in Hong Kong and Australia to cheer
on their team. Was there another way to
engage them, to both capture and ignite
their excitement?
The Tour had long been televised—most
recently, to 50 countries—and the 2009
Tour had boasted an elaborate website. But
this time The Lions wanted to do more.
They wanted a highly innovative way to
excite fans and to encourage them to
participate in the Tour—as much as would
be possible from half a planet away. And
for the fans who did go along for the Tour,
The Lions wanted to provide a central
source for all the information they needed.
That degree of interactivity suggested an
app, but not just any app. It would have to
be an app that could deliver a compelling
user experience on whatever device a fan
might have, with easy navigation through a
variety of data sources, including video,
player statistics, social media, and more.
Because The Lions would promote the app
to millions of people worldwide, it had to
be reliable and scalable. And, given the
rapidly approaching Tour, it had to be
developed quickly—within three months—
and cost-effectively.
Solution
The Lions turned to Sequence, a UK-based
Microsoft Partner with multiple Gold
competencies. Together, they produced
The British & Irish Lions Official App, which
met The Lions’ ambitious requirements—
and more. (The Lions used another
Windows Azure app to monitor player
fitness. See sidebar below.)
One of the most consequential decisions of
the project was the choice to host the app
on Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud
platform. Sequence supports both
Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services,
but saw several technical advantages for
The Lions on the Microsoft alternative.
“Microsoft technology is already embedded
in our processes,” explains Jon Stoneman,
Chief Technology Officer at Sequence.
“Windows Azure is an extension of that; it’s
just easier, more natural for us to use. Also,
the use of Windows Azure Media Services
saved us the need to create video encoding
and other media services on our own.”
Stoneman was also confident that Windows
Azure would provide the scalability and
reliability essential to a compelling
experience for millions of users around the
globe.
The app took full advantage of the ability
to “write once, run anywhere” with
Windows Azure; it ran on eight devices
(including Windows Phone 7, Windows
Phone 8, Windows 8, iOS for mobile and
tablet, and Android for mobile and tablet).
The app took particular advantage of
Windows 8 features such as live tiles,
customizable lock screen, and share charm
to boost the its visual appeal and
interactivity.
The app used Windows Azure Websites to
support its scalability, which went as high
as 10 instances during matches and as low
as 2 instances at other times. Developers
used the Windows Azure CDN to provide
the global reach that the app required,
while minimizing throughput bottlenecks.
And Sequence used Windows Azure worker
roles to pull news stories and player
statistics from third-party sources and to
update them in the app every few seconds.
Figure 1. A popular “on the
plane” feature gave fans a
chance to guess which players
would make the final cut for the
Tour.
As required, the app debuted in March
2013, three months before the start of the
Tour, and well in time to contribute to the
marketing momentum. It featured in-depth
Tour text, statistics, photos, and video, and
the ability to share information with the
rest of the online sporting community
through a featured Twitter feed. Fans were
encouraged to brush up on team songs
with a song sheet feature and then post
their renditions on the team’s Facebook
page.
A popular “on the plane” competition (see
Figure 1) gave fans the chance to create
their own dream squads. Those who
submitted correct predictions of the actual
lineup were entered into a drawing, with
the winner invited to attend the squad
announcement as the guest of Microsoft
and of British television personality former
Lions player Will Greenwood. The
competition was also featured on The
Lions’ website and on MSN, with contest
entries from those various front ends all
flowing to a single logical back end on
Windows Azure, including a single
Windows Azure SQL Database.
The “behind-the-scenes” content was
among the app’s most popular. It featured
videos shot by The Lions themselves, using
Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phones and
Microsoft Surface tablets, and uploaded by
the team to Windows Azure for fans to
access through the app.
In 2013, for the first time in 16 years, The
Lions won their Tour. And thanks to a
Windows Azure app, their fans were
virtually there to cheer them on to victory.
Benefits
The British & Irish Lions, together with
software developer Sequence, used
Windows Azure to create a mobile app that
met the customer’s needs for compelling
“We thought hosting
Linux on Windows Azure
would be tough. We
were wrong. Everything
just worked. And the
console and
configuration flexibility
was an advantage over
what we see from other
cloud providers.”
Macdara Butler, Commercial Director,
Elite Edge
content, scalability, and reliability, and
rapid—but low-cost—development.
Non-Professionals Easily Upload NearReal-Time Video
“We did this app for the fans, to give them
something we’d never offered before in the
way of involvement with the team,” says
Shane Whelan, Digital Communications
Manager for The British & Irish Lions. “We
succeeded. We gave them a real taste of
what it was like to be on the Tour.”
According to Whelan, user feedback on the
app was overwhelmingly positive. He
attributes that to unusual features, a lot of
interactivity, and a deliberate focus on ease
of use. “You’d expect to see text and
pictures and even video on the app, but we
put video footage on the app that wasn’t
widely used and that most fans wouldn’t
have seen until our DVD came out,” he
says. “It was immediate video. We had fans
using the app and watching the video
successfully on every type of phone and
tablet—but we got the most comments
about the video on the Lumia and Surface;
it looked fantastic.”
One key to the “immediate video” was that
Sidebar: Winning the Tour: There’s an App for That.
Motivating fans wasn’t the only challenge that The British & Irish Lions addressed with the
help of a Windows Azure app. Another was the challenge of monitoring the team’s fitness in
order to optimize its training and—management hoped—its performance.
Solution provider Elite Edge had built a Linux- and Adobe Flex–based app for the Welsh
Rugby Union that included a questionnaire that players answered, covering everything from
how long and well they’d slept the night before to any sniffles, aches, or pains they felt. On
the basis of that information, coaches could choose players for a day’s game, increase or
decrease the day’s training load, change specialized schedules, or work around players who
needed time to recuperate from injuries—but who wouldn’t have admitted their weakness to
a coach or other players.
When The Lions saw the app, they knew it could be a major help—but who on the team
knew how to manage a Linux server application a world away from the team’s home office?
That’s where Microsoft came in. Elite Edge worked with Microsoft to host the LAMP (Linux,
Apache, MySQL, and PHP) back end on a Windows Azure infrastructure as a service virtual
machine, without modification. None of The Lions staff—non-techies all—needed to manage
it or even worry about it.
“We were a Linux house, and we thought hosting Linux on Windows Azure would be tough,”
says Macdara Butler, Commercial Director at Elite Edge. “We were wrong. Everything just
worked. And the console and configuration flexibility was an advantage over what we see
from other cloud providers.”
The developers used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 development system to rewrite the
original HTML 5 client app as a Windows 8 Metro-style app using the HTML JS approach
with XAML, and they completed this process—their first Windows development experience—
in 200 hours. The app ran on Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, which meant that the team could
connect them to digital weighing scales via USB, something they couldn’t have done, for
example, with iPads.
The Lions players took to the app immediately and completed the daily self-surveys in 40
percent less time than their Welsh colleagues had needed for the earlier version. That
savings—20 seconds per player per survey—was truly significant. “Rugby players aren’t
mouse-and-keyboard types,” says Butler. “Getting them in and out faster means we were
more likely to get them to take the surveys in the first place, making the data and analysis
more meaningful. And that 20 seconds per player added up fast; it gave coaches about 10
minutes more each morning to plan their schedules.”
How effective was the app? For the first time in 16 years, The Lions won the Tour. No one at
The Lions says that’s because of the app, of course. But no one wants to stop using it, either.
“We found the most
elegant and practical
solution with regard to
hosting the app was to
choose Windows Azure.”
Jon Stoneman, Chief Technology Officer,
Sequence
Whelan and a couple of his colleagues were
taking and uploading video themselves.
“We couldn’t have done shared video over
an app with fans halfway around the world
if Microsoft hadn’t made it so easy for us,”
he says.
Supports 12,000 Page Requests per
Second with 10 Instances
The Lions and Surface couldn’t know how
many simultaneous fans they’d have to
support with the new app—but they had to
make sure that the app wouldn’t crash
under the load. It didn’t.
The highest loads came to about 360,000
page requests per minute for updated
statistical data, peaking at about 12,000
requests per second. The app also
supported up to 30 Mbps of game data
and more than 50 gigabytes of streaming
video per day.
The app supported these requests with a
maximum of 10 instances of Windows
Azure—a relatively small number,
according to Stoneman. “We found the
most elegant and practical solution with
regard to hosting the app was to choose
Windows Azure,” says Stoneman, “thus
enabling us to cope with the massive traffic
predicted during key times, match days for
example, and giving us the flexibility and
freedom to engage with as many users as
possible. Using Windows Azure also
provided peace of mind that the app would
be very reliable and quick.”
Reduces Development Time and Cost,
and Hosting Expense by 80 Percent
The Lions wanted their app to be produced
quickly and cost-effectively. Because of the
running start that the development team
got from using familiar Microsoft
technology and ready-built infrastructure
components such as Windows Azure Media
Services, The Lions met this goal, too.
Stoneman estimates that using Windows
Azure reduced development time and cost
by 80 percent. “We had less than three
months to produce the app,” he notes. “We
couldn’t have delivered the full-featured
app on this schedule, meeting this budget,
without Windows Azure.”
Hosting costs were similarly reduced,
because of the ability to scale Windows
Azure instances up and down quickly in
response to changes in demand.
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For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
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go to:
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For more information about Sequence
products and services, visit the website
at:
http://www.sequence.co.uk/
For more information about Elite Edge
products and services, visit the website
at:
www.eliteedge.com
For more information about British & Irish
Lions, visit the website at:
www.lionsrugby.com
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published January 2014
Software and Services
Hardware
Windows Azure Platform
− Windows Azure Cloud Services
− Windows Azure CDN
− Windows Azure Infrastructure
Services
− Windows Azure Media Services
− Windows Azure SQL Database
− Windows Azure Websites
 Visual Studio 2012 development system



Microsoft Surface Pro tablets
Nokia Lumia phones
Partners

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Elite Edge
Sequence